"Kaloma"

gelatin silver print, hand colored

Whether or not this portrait depicts the famous dancer and actress Josephine Earp - longtime companion of Wild West gunslinger Wyatt Earp - has become a point of contention throughout the history. In 1914, a vignette image of a beautiful young woman posing boldly for the camera in a gauzy peignoir became popular. It was entitled Kaloma and was originally produced as an art print. The daring picture was popular and sold well. That same year, the image appeared on the cover of a solo piano piece by Gire Goulineaux “Kaloma, Valse Hesitante”, it enjoyed great popularity as a pin-up girl during the First World War and the post-war period and perhaps most famously as the motif for a poster for the concert by Vanilla Fudge and The Charles Lloyd Quartet at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco on September 29 to October 1, 1967.
It was the author Glenn Boyer who created the myth that the woman depicted was Josie Earp. He used a version of the picture, in which the robe was darkened using an airbrush technique, for the cover of the non-fiction book “I Married Wyatt Earp”, published in 1976, about the life of Josephine Earp alongside the famous and infamous gunslinger Wyatt Earp. In fact, however, Josephine would have been 53 years old at the time of the recording in 1914. It was not until the late 1990s that it emerged that the best-selling non-fiction book about the life of Josephine Earp was a fictionalized story by the author. In 1998, Sotheby's auction house sold the picture as Josephine Earp for an incredible 2,875 dollars.
Earp or not, the picture is nevertheless a beautiful, early example of the seductive power of photography and the power of the image.
(Christoph Fuchs, translated by DeepL.com)